“What would you do if you could publish only 20 papers throughout your career?” asks Juan-Carlos Lopez on Spoonful of Medicine blog, referring to this month’s Nature Medicine editorial (free access at Nat. Med. 13, 1121; 2007). If scientists would agree to limit their output to 20 papers over a career, would this clean up the scientific literature and improve on the peer-review process? Juan-Carlos writes: "many articles reporting incremental advances would no longer be written, and many specialized journals would disappear. And with far fewer papers to read, each one reporting a much more complete piece of research, search committees or funding bodies could directly evaluate the work of a given scientist, instead of leaning on surrogate indicators such as a journal’s impact factor or number of citations, “evil” numbers that many researchers love to hate."

See the Nature Medicine editorial for further details of this radical proposal.